M& D Group Read (cont.)

[Joseph Tracy]

Oh yea. Paranoia goes way back. And there have  in historic times always been people organized to subjugate, control, wipe out … some other people. So IMO paranoia has always been perfectly logical for some, though often misdirected.  
 in M&D the true emergent power is the corporation - amoral, greed/trade fueled, sociopathic armies colluding with nation states that live or die based on success in international markets.

  We also  get regular doses of paranoia about the Jesuits/Pope and this clearly carries into America. The Brits seem to politicize their paranoia. Protestant/Catholic more a political than religious struggle, and Puritan/ Anglican is the same argument about centralized vs collegial systems of authority with Quakers going further past collegial to collective and from scriptural authority to non-creedal divine revelation.( semi-full disclosure- I attend Quaker meeting and am a kind of Taoist, Psychedelic,  artist/anarchist,true believer, buddhist skeptic who has read the Bible more times than most and studied   a  lot of religious history).  
   The Dutch are Calvinist as are Puritans and believe everyone is predetermined to hell or heaven, and since you can never really know, this may be the apogee of all-encompassing paranoia. 
 Much of the paranoia is personal, who is cheating on who, power struggles in the Royal Society or concerning the use of lust and ambition to lay traps. 
 Another and somewhat different  though very pervasive paranoia that is being carried into America is the fear of the colonized. This is not a conspiracy oriented paranoia but simply the fear that you may, despite your techological/military expertise, reap what you sew. It fuels racism and generates its own conspiracies to violently take what is wanted.  One way this paranoia is emphasized  is the recurrent mention of the Black Hole of Calcutta.
  Bonk starts as the rep of Company’s police state power and ends leaving to escape it.
  
The American revolution was from British eyes a conspiracy by tax evaders to overthrow their legitimate rule, from Tom Paine’s eyes the assertion of a human right to local self government.
> Surely people are profiting off, eg, all this slavery. People are making decisions. Or are they?
Of course they are. Wars for power are highly organized around heirarchical decision makers as is economic exploitation, They are not geuinely ideological but flexible to make alliances and take advantage of perceived weakness. Of course  propaganda is a key tool to organize popular fears and appetites to fuel the profits of success.
   
  Send Lawyers Guns and Money
  The shit has hit the fan
  
  
> On Jan 17, 2018, at 10:02 AM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In my reread of M&D thus far it seems that paranoia is emergent even (because of course) in colonial times, and yet the “civilized” people are increasingly finding themselves shuffled to and pursued into new frontiers of unknowability. Who sends them? Who chases? Not always clear. 
> 
> But then someone must be behind it all, no? Surely people are profiting off, eg, all this slavery. People are making decisions. Or are they?
> 
> I think M&D broadens the conspiratorial view out of just the history-making animal’s historical brain and into its interaction with the physical spaces around those brains. 
> 
> There’s a lot going on with (possibly natural laws of) urbanity and density and geography (and madness?). Even if you can ascend the chain of conspiracy and continue arriving at Christian-named conspirators, they themselves are just conspired *through* by forces more superhumanly powerful than even They are. 
> 
> On Jan 17, 2018, at 5:31 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Ah, the conspiracy of the separate snippet when everything doesn't connect.
>> 
>> Lensing quoting Wood BOTH love M & D to the skies. The snippet is part of an argument that
>> the conspiracy (of History) framework of GR (and Vineland?) are Gone, gone as gone girls in Mason & Dixon. 
>> 
>> Mich Wood's over-the-top rave for Mason & Dixon was in Raritan, a review with a thematic reading, not just
>> 'full, rich characters and terrif prose":
>> 
>> In his detailed review "Pynchon's Mason & Dixon" (Raritan, 4, 1998, 120-130), Michael Wood first discusses the book's intentional aimlessness, then takes up differing reviews of Louis Menand and James Wood. Next he fixes upon the choices between "wonder" and "care," and determines that the novel is "about learning, rather slowly, to care instead of wonder." He next discusses Cherrycoke' snarratorrole and characterization of Mason and Dixon, Pynchon's use of bantering prose ...
>> 
>> Now discuss THIS. 
>> 
>> extra credit: Tanner's book on American Literature written before M & D: The Reign of Wonder. 
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 4:52 AM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Howdy,
>> 
>> I haven't read the article but a little research shows that the fellow was not exactly specialized in reading Pynchon. I won't say more because the poor guy died very young so he's not around to argue. However, the one Pynchon book that Michiko K. thought was good was M&D, so he took a pretty difficult position to argue. I find the book to be masterful in its narrative construction and structure. J. Wood slagged it off but he's a wanker who used to be keen on Pynchon, enough so to put him on a top 100 list years ago. Doesn't talk about that now, does he?
>> 
>> mc
>> 
>> 	Libre de virus. www.avast.com
>> 
>> On Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 7:06 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> As Michael Wood writes of Mason & Dixon. "No overarching conspiracy, or even the steady suspicion of one, unites the
>> unravlled strands of this book" ---essay Postmodernism at Sea, Dennis Lensing in Hinds' book. 
>> 
>> Discuss. 
>> 
>> 

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